When they were alone in the Bath, the sun darkening the paper on the windows, Frida kept her eyes on the plastic tubs. She couldn’t look at Cal, absorb that neediness. She knew he wanted her to say something like Can you believe this? or Where the hell are we? He wanted to be comforted by their camaraderie, but Frida was too zombified to offer him anything of the sort. She would wash herself, and that was all. Cal would follow her lead.
She plunged her hands into water so cold it made her teeth ache and scrubbed her pits until her arms hurt. It felt good to be clean. She stepped into the tub next, to soak her feet.
Cal finished quickly, and she watched as he applied hydrocortisone to the island of dry skin on his arm and aloe to the back of his neck.
Frida grabbed a razor next. Its hollow nothing-weight took her breath away.
Her skin was so dry, and her leg hair so thick, that she winced as she dragged the razor across her skin. “Does it hurt?” Cal asked, but she didn’t reply. She moisturized afterward, rubbing the lotion into her calves and even across the tops of her feet. Her skin looked amazing bare, smooth as a slide. She hadn’t seen her legs hairless in years, and she’d missed it.
“I wonder if I can get waxed here,” she said.
Cal laughed too hard. He’d hang on to that joke for the next eight hours.
He didn’t say anything as she replaced her dirty shirt with the one Sailor had given her: it was powder blue and fit just right.
Sailor knocked on the Bath door then. Time was up.
Sailor was to show them the Land. Frida allowed herself to be led around, but she didn’t ask any questions. Not about the Spikes surrounding them on all sides, nor about the various decrepit houses where all these people lived, nor about the barn and garden beyond. The tour probably would have been more in-depth had Frida allowed it to be, but every time Sailor asked if they wanted to see something beyond this strip of real estate—they had two cows, apparently, and a herd of goats and a place where residents could sleep under the stars, should they so choose—Frida shook her head. It’d been a while since they’d seen Micah.
“I’d like to see the barn,” Cal said.
Frida shook her head again. “I’d like to see my brother.”
“Fine, fine,” Sailor said, and led them back to the building where they’d left Micah.
In the late nineteenth century, its glory days, it had been a hotel, or more than that. Sailor explained that on the bottom floor there had once been a restaurant and a meeting room for locals and a small store at the back that had sold grains, bolts of cloth, axes. Now, the restaurant kitchen and dining room were where food for the residents was prepared and served. When it was first built, guests stayed in the hotel rooms on the three upper floors, usually for a few nights, but sometimes longer if they were waiting for permanent lodging. It was all in the pamphlet, Sailor said. People used to come to view the decrepit buildings, and the Hotel was one of the main attractions.
“A couple of years before the town closed to tourists,” Sailor explained, “money was poured into rehabbing the building, and the Church, too. They obviously ran out of funds before they could finish. But, still, neither is collapsing anytime soon.”
“Where is everyone?” Cal asked.
It was a good question. Frida had gotten so used to being isolated, she had barely noticed that all the people who had crowded the main street just an hour before were now gone.
She looked up; on the second floor of a building, a woman was watching them. When they caught eyes, the woman ducked out of sight.
“Micah told them to make themselves scarce,” Sailor said. “Until later.”
“‘Later’?” Cal asked.
They stepped up to the porch of the Hotel, and Frida could tell that Cal was stalling. He wanted to get as much out of Sailor as he could before the others returned. This kid was a talker.
“So where’s August?” Cal asked.
Sailor smiled and put his hand on the door. It looked solid, obviously part of the renovation. “He’s on another trip.”
Cal nodded, as if he expected this. “When will he be back?”
Frida didn’t think Sailor would fall for it, but he was as carefree as those gophers Cal had planned to capture in his traps.
“In a day or two. Don’t worry, you’ll see him soon. He likes to relax between trips.”
So August lived on the Land. He was one of them. When Frida had told him about her brother, August had known it was Micah she was talking about.
“Let’s go inside,” Sailor said.
On their way in, Frida tried to catch Cal’s eye, but for once he wasn’t looking at her. That, or he was pretending not to care about what he’d just learned.
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